MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Just days before Hurricane Katrina struck his neighborhood in New Orleans, Clint Smith turned 17. His family heeded the warning to evacuate, and when they returned weeks later, photo albums and artwork they'd secured in garbage bags on the second floor was just about all that survived intact. Clint Smith is now a celebrated writer for The Atlantic who often writes about history and memory, and he wrote about his memory of Katrina and the aftermath in the latest issue. Clint Smith, welcome back. Thanks for joining us.
CLINT SMITH: So good to be here.
MARTIN: So you grew up in - what's it called? - the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans.
SMITH: Indeed, in Gentilly.
MARTIN: What do you remember about it before Katrina?
SMITH: Oh, it was an incredible place to grow up. It was really diverse. I remember riding bikes with my friends up and down the street. I remember people playing basketball and everybody kind of going from one driveway or one park to the next to search for an open game or a hoop. I remember the shade of these just massive oak trees as they hung over you, even on hot summer days, providing respite from the heat.
MARTIN: So the morning of August 27, 2005, you write that your father woke up feeling uneasy. Will you talk about that? What was he uneasy about?
SMITH: Yeah. So people had begun talking about Katrina as the big one. And the thing to understand about New Orleanians is that this is something that we've been told over and over and over again, that the coming hurricane one year was going to be the one that really wiped New Orleans out. For so many times throughout my childhood, these sort of evacuations were excuses to go hang out with my cousins, hang out with my aunts and uncles in Houston, where we usually evacuated. But this one was obviously different. And Ray Nagin, the mayor at the time, issued a mandatory evacuation for New Orleans, which was the first in history. And I think even before that mandatory evacuation notice went out, my dad, he kind of woke up in the middle of the night, and he had a feeling. He was like, I think this is going to be different, and I think that we should get out of here.
MARTIN: So you wound up waiting out the storm in Houston this time. You didn't come back for weeks. Would you describe just what you saw on your street when you first got back?
SMITH: So we were among the first allowed back into New Orleans. After the storm, you know, water sat in New Orleans for weeks. Eighty percent of New Orleans was underwater. Our house was included, and so we all were wearing these hazmat suits and gas masks and made our way to our street. And these beautiful oak trees that I described, those branches were all on the ground. They were no longer sort of hanging over the street in a way that felt decadent, and oftentimes the trunks themselves had been uprooted and were strewn across the street in ways that looked like a bomb had gone off. And then when we got to our door, it had the orange spray paint on it that sort of signaled that somebody had come to check and see if there was anybody inside. It told you the date. It told you the crew. It told you how many bodies they found, and ours said zero because no bodies had been found inside.
MARTIN: You know, you ended up staying in Houston. You never really went back to New Orleans. And I take it you just - you didn't go back afterwards. I mean, you live in the D.C. area now. Why, do you think?
SMITH: My sister and I were not able to go back and finish the school year. By the time there was an opportunity to go back, we were already a semester into school, and I think we just accepted that we would finish the school year in this place. But my family came back. We bought a new house. And so I never lived in that house. I still call it the new house, even though my parents have now lived in that house for 20 years.
MARTIN: One of the things that - the reason I sort of raised that is that there's a loss. I mean, thankfully, no one in your family lost their lives, but you still lost. You didn't get to be - maybe you'd have been the captain of the soccer team, or you didn't get to go to prom. There was a loss of memory in a way. I mean, all you have is memory - right?
SMITH: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...Of the before and the after. And in that sense, your experience is that of so many other people in New Orleans who lost their homes, their livelihoods, their places of familiarity.
SMITH: Yeah.
MARTIN: Do you think you carry that sense of loss with you?
SMITH: For a long time, I almost denied that there was a loss because I was raised in a home in a faith tradition that always taught me to focus on that which I have and to think about how fortunate I am relative to other people. And so I think in the context of New Orleans, when it was a moment where you bore witness to a sort of unprecedented stress and...
MARTIN: Devastation.
SMITH: ...Devastation from - you know, I will always remember the images of people on their rooftops. I will always remember the images of the bodies floating in the water. I'll always remember the images of people in the Superdome when the roof came off. I'll always remember the images of people dying outside the convention center, of people being in the Astrodome in Houston, of people having nowhere to go and just, you know, waiting for months and months and months for a FEMA trailer so that they could come back to their home. And so I say all that because I mourn what I lost in my own life, but relative to so many others, I felt like I almost didn't have the right or the space to sit with that loss.
MARTIN: You're a person of words, a person of memory, a person of history. You kind of tie all those things together. You chose to write about this in very personal terms. I mean, you didn't really deal with the big sort of structural themes...
SMITH: Right.
MARTIN: ...In your piece. And I just wonder what that means. Does it mean that Katrina has really receded into history now?
SMITH: I think there's two things there - one, that there's this sort of New Orleans diaspora that those of us who left after Katrina, who now only go back for holidays or funerals, we want our kids to feel a connection to this place, even if it's a place that they have never lived themselves because it is a place that's unlike anywhere else in the world. The second thing is that the experience of Katrina served as the catalyst for a meaningful interrogation of - and a sort of clarifying experience in terms of who the American dream was for and who it wasn't for, who had access and opportunity to upward mobility in this country and who didn't. And I think it, in many ways, was one of the first public, large-scale moments that demonstrated the way in which this country has systemically and intergenerationally failed so many people within the Black community.
MARTIN: Clint Smith is a writer for The Atlantic, and he's the author of The New York Times bestseller "How The Word Is Passed." Clint Smith, thank you so much for joining us.
SMITH: It's always a pleasure.
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